Questioning Your Way to Certainty (long extract)

"Try to look at what in your mind is skillful and what’s unskillful, try to notice the qualities that lead to skillful action and unskillful action.

You can start by asking those questions about your breath: What way of breathing feels good? What way of breathing doesn’t feel good? Pose that question in your mind and then experiment with different kinds of breathing. You’ll start noticing that certain rhythms of breathing or certain ways of conceiving the breath feel better than others. Then you ask yourself, “How can I maintain those ways of breathing? And how I you ride with the waves of change that go through your body?” Sometimes a particular rhythm feels good for a while, but then the body doesn’t need that rhythm anymore. It needs a different rhythm. How do you sense that? It’s like riding a surfboard. How do you sense shifts in the wave so you can stay balanced? And when you can maintain that sense of ease, how do you spread it through the body?

This involves asking yourself how you conceive of the breath energy in the body. What’s actually happening when you breathe in? How does this breath energy flow? And when Ajaan Lee talks about breath energy, exactly what is he talking about? How can you sense the breath in your own body? How do you let comfortable energy spread? What way of forcing it through the body actually makes it uncomfortable? What way of forcing it through actually works? Do you need to use force? Sometimes you do; sometimes you don’t. And how do you learn to read the signs of what’s working and what’s not working?

These questions are helpful. They help you to read what’s actually going on, and they overcome your uncertainty because you begin to gain your own evidence as to what works and what doesn’t. You start looking at how the breath affects the mind, what kind of breathing goes along with unskillful mental states and what kind of breathing goes along with skillful ones. Here you look for cause and effect going in both directions. Some mental states will come and bring along a catch or a tightness in the breath, or a blockage in the breath energy in different parts of the body. Other times, you’ll find that certain ways of breathing aggravate unskillful mental states. So the question is, how do you cut through those feedback loops? How do you breathe in a way that helps to nourish skillful mental states?

Notice that the solution to uncertainty here isn’t coming into the meditation armed with lots of answers. Instead, you come to the meditation armed with the right questions, questions that focus your attention on what you can actually see happening right here and now in terms of cause and effect. That’s how you overcome your uncertainty. You know from experience that this works, that that doesn’t work. You learn to evaluate things on your own."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Questioning Your Way to Certainty"